Corona v. Titanium - Creating iPhone and Android Apps in One Framework
Date: Mon, 09/26/2011 - 5:44pm
Many cross platform mobile application frameworks have surfaced in the past few years, and some of them look very promising. If you can build an iPhone app and an Android app using the same coding language, it can definitely save time and resources. Over the next few weeks, we will be experimenting with two popular cross-platform app frameworks, Corona and Titanium.
Corona is geared more toward game development but can be used to build other types of apps as well. Corona uses Lua as its coding language of choice, and can compile iOS and Android devices. Corona requires a subscription of $350 a year to publish devices to app stores.
Titanium is a free and open source app development platform, which lets you create native mobile and tablet applications using Javascript, HTML, and CSS. One of the greatest features of Titanium is that supports all of the native iPhone and Android UI and has access to many native features of both platforms.
In our previous experience with Corona, we've experienced several issues with targeting different devices. For example, the aspect ratio of the Motorola Droid, Samsung Galaxy Tab, iPhone, iPad, and Nexus One are all different. So we found that designing the app can be a challenge, especially if you are building a game with graphics that can’t scale. There are workarounds, however, and perhaps the most obvious solution is to design the app with large bleeding edges so that you can use the same background images on multiple devices and then just center the image in the window.
In all likelihood, developing an app for multiple aspect ratios may not be truly possible without creating separate builds for each device size.
One of the features of Corona is ability to determine the device running the app and then change values based on that information, for example:
We will continue to research into cross platform app development, and offer updates later on this year.
